Pre
tty excited that a letter that I wrote to the editor of Comment in response to an article entitled Consumption and Culture-Making: Let’s fight for balance and care in our fight against resource over-consumption was published in the Summer 2014 issue of the magazine. Have a look below to see what I had to say. Would love to hear what you think!
Dijkema is right (Consumption and Culture-Making: Let’s fight for balance and care in our fight against resource over-consumption, Spring 2014) when he suggests that environmentalists too are resource-consumers (and sometimes—perhaps, often—hypocritically so). However, Dijkema’s position does not reflect the urgency of our environmental predicament: human actions are changing the planet’s climate in drastic ways which may soon make it inhospitable to life in many already vulnerable locations (check out the latest report released by the International Panel on Climate Change on March 30, 2014). I agree that we cannot let climate change fear mongering get in the way of being human and enjoying life, but we must also be careful not to justify our current socially and ecologically unsustainable lifestyles. After all, destroying our only home is surely not part of the cultural mandate.
